He’s visiting this fall,and Magister looks at some recent hints of the approach:

But on that trip, which includes stops in Ankara and Ephesus in addition to Istanbul, Benedict XVI will also encounter Islam, and Turkish Islam in particular.

And the pope made statements of significant interest on this topic in recent days.

He made them while receiving in private audience the president of North Rhine-Westphalia, Jürgen Rüttgers, who later related the pope’s comments during an interview with Vatican Radio.

Around a million Muslims live in North Rhine-Westphalia, most of them having come from Turkey.

Jürgen Rüttgers said that Benedict XVI “holds that it is very important for Muslim children to have the opportunity to attend in our schools an hour of instruction, in German, in the Muslim religion, with teachers who have been trained in Germany and under school supervision.”

And not only that: “The Holy Father vigorously called attention back to the necessity for every society to live on the basis of values. These are the same values found in the German constitution, which are founded on the Jewish-Christian West and the Enlightenment.” A positive integration of the new Muslim generations “presupposes the recognition of the rules of the federal Republic.”

It is interesting to link these affirmations from Benedict XVI to the controversy unleashed last March by a statement by cardinal Renato Martino in favor of the teaching of the Muslim religion in the schools in Europe.

Benedict XVI also says he is in favor of this instruction. But he joins it to precise conditions, which Martino ignored.

They are the same conditions to which cardinal Camillo Ruini referred when speaking on the controversy: “in particular it is necessary that there not be any conflict in the content of the instruction with respect to our constitution, for example with regard to civil rights, from religious freedom to the equality between man and woman to marriage”.

It is well known that pope Ratzinger sees in this instruction a decisive vehicle for the integration of Muslims into Western society. He said so in no uncertain terms on August 20, 2006, while meeting with German representatives of Islam in Cologne:

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